In the 19th century, higher criticism flourished in Germany, establishing the historical-critical method as an academic standard for interpreting the Bible and understanding the historical Jesus (see Tübingen school).

He was born at Dorpat (today Tartu) in Livonia (then a province of Russia, now in Estonia) where his father, Theodosius Harnack, held a professorship of pastoral theology.

These lectures, which dealt with such special subjects as Gnosticism and the Apocalypse, attracted considerable attention, and in 1876 he was appointed professor extraordinarius.

In this work Harnack traced the rise of dogma, which he understood as the authoritative doctrinal system of the church and its development from the 4th century down to the Protestant Reformation.

Therefore, Protestants are not only free, but bound, to criticize it; Protestantism could be understood as a rejection of this dogma and a return to the pure faith that characterized the original church.

Harnack's view was that the creed contains both too much and too little to be a satisfactory test for candidates for ordination; he preferred a briefer declaration of faith which could be rigorously applied to all (cf.

One of his later historical works, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (1902; English translation, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, in two volumes, 1904–1905), was followed by some important New Testament studies (Beitrage zur Einleitung in das neue Testament, 1906 sqq.

[2] Harnack was one of the most prolific and stimulating of modern critical scholars, and brought up in his "Seminar" a whole generation of teachers who carried his ideas and methods throughout the whole of Germany and beyond.

It was this statement, with his teacher Harnack's signature on it, that Karl Barth cited as a major impetus for his rejection of liberal theology.

After a long period in U.S. Army hands after World War II it has now resumed the role Harnack envisaged, as a centre for international intellectual life in the German capital, under the management of the KWG's successor organisation, the Max Planck Gesellschaft.

Harnack regarded all four gospels to be "not altogether useless as sources of history", but still, "not written with the simple object of giving the facts as they were; they are books composed for the work of evangelisation.

That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe; but that the lame walked, the blind saw, and the deaf heard, will not be so summarily dismissed as an illusion.